Do you think the Bible should change with time to fit society?

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The classic answer to the conundrum is simply to write more scripture. The Old Testament is a collection of poems, writings, histories, letters that collectively form the background matter of the Hebrew people, the baseline artifacts that define the culture of the Hebrew people.

Scholars have examined the Old Testament and come to the realization that the Genesis narrative was collected and synthesized from two sources, the Priestly writer and the older Yahwist. The people doing the believing in the myths didn’t seem to mind all that much. Whether God made Adam from clay or simply willed him into existence was not something to get dogmatic about at the time.

Genesis represents new scripture written to collect the best ideas of both of the older creation tales. There is nothing wrong with this. It doesn’t invalidate religion, rather, it keeps the ideas fresh.

I came up with an interesting turn of phrase that I was sure at the time to have heard from somewhere. “Old myth made new.” When I went to go looking for the source of the saying, I couldn’t find any. Apparently I’m the first person to say that. So that’s pretty cool. But changing around the theme and the lessons that religious scripture teaches is an essential part of keeping the mystery alive. You don’t want them to die.

Modern myth includes things like Star Wars and the Marvel universe. Grand stories with grand characters doing things for grand reasons in a grand, fantastic world. They become cultural touchstones, and solidify, and eventually ossify, losing their ability to capture people’s attention. The old Marvel had to be re-envisioned for a new age.

And so it is with scripture. The New Testament is intended to continue the story of the Old by telling a new story about a new figure. And people made lots of meaning around the new stories. Some new groups of people made new scripture, like the Book of Mormon, intended to create a new cultural touchstone to facilitate spiritual experience with.

This idea of religious fundamentalism, that of unwavering faith in a particular set of religious ideas, is as new as it is dangerous. Nobody back then took these stories so seriously that they fought wars over it. Wars were fought primarily for economic reasons, even in the heydey of the Catholic Church the pope often acted in a diplomatic fashion to alleviate the need for warfare. War became interestingly civilized over the course of the Middle Ages, of course that changed as technology got better.

Now religion needs to be adapted to a new age. There’s really no point in reinventing Christianity, so the way forward is to tell some new stories about a mythic figure that can capture our imagination the same way Jesus did back in the day.